Spirit of the Wolf

by Vonna Harper

Just us. Just like I hoped. “What about Addie?”

  “Staying here’s hard for her. She’s off seeing her sister in Vegas.”

  As a child, she’d briefly lived in Las Vegas with her parents. Hated everything about it.

  “When’s she coming back?”

  “She’s not sure.”

  Matt didn’t want to talk anymore; he was ready for action. So was she, and yet there were things she wished she could ask him about his relationship with Addie—and with Santo before the older man’s death. The three of them had lived together in the house, sharing work, meals, and companionship. According to her friend Daria, Addie’s parents had been the ranch’s original owners. When Addie was a teenager, her parents had hired Santo. Before long, the two young people had fallen in love. Daria didn’t know how Addie’s parents had felt about their only child hooking up with a man who spoke broken English, but no one disputed Santo’s competence when it came to running a cattle ranch. After Santo and Addie married, Santo had moved into the house. For years, the two couples from different generations had worked together to keep Coyote Ranch going.

  First Addie’s mother and then her father had gotten cancer, dying within a year of each other. Santo and Addie hadn’t had children—rumor was they’d had nothing but miscarriages to show for all their trying. The ranch became their life.

  Then, as Santo had done, Matt had come along. One rumor was that Matt had escaped from a juvenile-detention facility and found refuge on the ranch. Another rumor was that Matt’s folks had owed Addie’s parents some kind of debt. They’d paid it off by indenturing their strong teenage son to them.

  Matt had never said what the truth was.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Startled by the unexpected question—where had her thinking taken her?—Cat blinked Matt into focus. Damn but he was close.

  “About you,” she admitted.

  “Me too.” The hands she’d stared at when they were on Ginger landed on her shoulders. His fingers slipped under her tank top’s shoulder straps. “I’ve never seen you in a sleeveless whatever-it’s-called before, have I?”

  “Probably not.” Today I wanted my clothes to speak to you, to say what I don’t have the words for.

  “I like. Especially the low-cut part.” Licking a forefinger, he ran it over the V-neck where cotton met cleavage.

  “Thought you would.”

  The corners of his usually straight mouth lifted. “Have you wondered what it would be like if we didn’t live so far apart?”

  Out here, an hour between properties wasn’t that much, but he had a point. “Think we’d get any work done?”

  “Depends on your definition of work.”

  Done with trying to keep the conversation going, she pulled his shirt out of his waistband so she could run her fingers over his middle. When he sucked in a breath, she crouched and lathed what she’d just exposed with her tongue. He continued to hold his breath.

  His jeans rode so low his navel was exposed. Wondering what happened to her when she was around him, she slipped her tongue into the indentation.

  Shuddering, he grabbed her long, single braid and pulled her head back. She had no choice but to stare up at him. “Damnation, woman!”

  “You don’t like?”

  “I like too much and you know it.”

  If not for the growing heat between her legs, she might have admitted that his reaction to foreplay was one of the few things she knew about him. Clenching her teeth, she straightened. Her hands remained at his waist.

  “What about Ginger? You going to ride her?”

  “When I’m done riding you.”

  “Just like that, you’re going to ride me?” she challenged. “Don’t you believe in courting a woman?”

  “I know what you want.”

  Anger sliced through her, but whether she was pissed at herself or him she couldn’t say. She wanted more than sex from him, didn’t she?

  Maybe not. Uncomplicated itch scratching had a lot going for it.

  “What do you, in your infinite masculine wisdom, believe I need?”

  His features sobering, he pulled the straps over her shoulders, so she risked ripping the fabric if she tried to raise her arms. Leaving her with her arms pinned to her sides, he dove a thumb into the valley between her breasts. “Bra’s in the way.”

  “That’s your problem, not mine.”

  “Oh, I don’t see it as a problem.” His other hand went to a front pocket, and he held up a small folding knife.

  “You wouldn’t!” Maybe the scenario called for her to back away, but she didn’t.

  “Don’t be so sure. You’d have to drive home with your breasts bouncing.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “You know the answer.”

  Of course she did. She might have told him if not for the distracting thumb still between her breasts. He returned the knife to his pocket—not that it mattered. Studying his chest beneath the shirt, she noted that his breathing deepened. Instead of the quick rise and fall that said he wanted to fuck her here and now, his breaths lengthened almost as if he was falling asleep.

  “What?” she whispered.

  When he gave no indication he’d heard, she lifted her gaze to his face. He’d turned his head and was staring at the hills. These weren’t the same as the ones near her place, the ones still giving up their secrets to her. Maybe Matt’s did the same for him.

  Trying not to think too much about the heat of his hand against her chest, she blinked his eyes into focus. Yes, there were the intense, shining black eyes she’d fallen in lust with, eyes with midnight buried in them.

  And again the scarlet.

  “What are you seeing?” she asked.

  2

  Cat had said something, the words spoken in a lilting tone with a hint of the deep behind the lift. Her body, less than a foot from mating with his, cried out, and his listened.

  Why, then, was it so hard to stop studying the horizon?

  Something rolled through Matt, a kind of cool heat with sharpness behind it. A sound accompanied the sharpness, a solitary and hollow note coming from an animal throat. The wind caught the sound and threw it about, sucking out the heat and leaving only the cold.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked, not taking his attention from where the sound had come from.

  “What? Matt, I didn’t hear anything.”

  Matt. Yes. That was his name.

  Shaking himself free of what couldn’t be but what had made him think of a wolf howl, he looked down at Cat. In winter, her long hair was a dark brown. Summer lightened things a bit so it turned reddish. He hadn’t mentioned it because he didn’t know how to bring up sun and women’s hair and what those things did to him. At least once he’d told her he liked the way her breasts filled his hand. She’d shaken her head when he had and laughed a less-than-real laugh. Then she’d told him he had to work on his seduction skills.

  Hell, he didn’t have any.

  Just today’s hard-on.

  Cat was giving him a head-tipped-to-the-side look that indicated it was his turn to say or do something. Speaking was more than he wanted to concentrate on. Action, however, he could do.

  Plan formed, he gripped her shirt hem and yanked the pale blue garment over her head. Her hair snapped with static electricity. He tossed the top onto her truck’s dusty hood. Good thing she was okay with everything the earth offered. At least he thought she was; he hadn’t asked.

  Placing her long, slender fingers under her breasts, she lifted them. “Still meet your approval?”

  Hell, yes. Even more so once the damn bra wasn’t in the way. Loving the enhanced swell above the white fabric, he slid his fingers over what she’d just offered him. Her breath caught, and she showed clenched teeth. Not thinking about what he was doing, he retraced his earlier move with a little more force and his nails making contact.

  “Easy,” she warned.

  There was dirt under his nails, and under no st
retch of the imagination could he call what he had a manicure, not that he’d ever had one. His cock felt tied in a knot. Unless she’d turned 180 degrees from what she’d always been, she was feeling the same. The sun’s heat bore down on them. Maybe he should cover her breasts with his hat.

  Where to take her? Out here with the mare watching—unless she slept through the whole thing. Or in the calving barn, only there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep it clean. Decisions to make when he wanted to unzip and enter.

  “Are you going to talk?” she asked.

  “Not much to say.”

  Her fingers were now around his wrists. Tan lay over tan, two sets of hands branded by their shared world.

  “No, there never is.”

  There was that off tone to her voice, not hard and hurting like Addie’s when she talked about Santo, but something he should do something about. Maybe he would if he understood what the hell had prompted it.

  He was good at sex. He wasn’t being boastful or bragging, just a conclusion reached as the result of compliments from the women around here he’d slept with, not that there were that many. Cat had never rated his performance. Her cries, a little like a hunting cougar, as she climaxed said he’d done what she needed doing. A few times women had told him he needed to slow down and enjoy the ride, but Cat hadn’t asked him to put on the brakes.

  Hell, sometimes she’d beaten him to climax.

  Cat’s fingers tightened, cutting off the circulation in his wrists. “This get your attention?” she asked.

  Much as he wanted to shake free, he put it off. “Yeah. What do you want?”

  “Funny, Matt, funny.” She lightly kicked him in the shin. “I don’t have to spell it out.”

  Maybe she knew what she was putting him through, because her grip let up so blood flow resumed. They’d fuck outside, he decided, where the sometimes breeze reached them and he could see the hills—including the one where Santo had died. All that was left to decide was the specifics.

  “I saw Beale in town the other day,” she said, leaning forward so her breath warmed and dampened his shirt. “He said one of those mega beef corporations offered to buy you out.”

  “Did he?” She wanted to talk now?

  “And that you sent them packing. Told them you’d go to your grave before you sent your grass-fed, open-range beef to a feed lot to be pumped full of growth hormones and protein supplements.”

  His goal was to die a participant in the natural beef industry, but life had taught him to take nothing, including parents, for granted. “Beale’s a hard worker.”

  “Just not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Unlike you.”

  Not expecting a compliment, he took hold of her arms and pushed her back so he could get a better look into her eyes. Nearly as green as spring grass, they’d take hold of him if he wasn’t careful. What he wanted from her was sex—same as she did. But sometimes, like now, when he was thinking about how deep her eyes went into him or the occasional dream about waking to find her beside him, he wondered if there could be more between them.

  If he’d tell her what had brought him to Coyote Ranch.

  “What are you looking for, cowboy?” Her question was light, but her expression made a lie of the light.

  His mouth opened. He actually thought he had something to say. Then the distant hills again drew him. Holding her within inches of his cock, he stared. The sun made him squint. From this distance, each hill looked the same, gray and done in. They were different up close, of course. Not only were hundreds of his cattle in the valleys and on the slopes, but also antelope shared the area with them. Also the coyotes Addie’s folks had named the ranch after. Also lizards, mule deer, butterflies, horned larks, prairie falcons, burrowing owls, gopher snakes, rattlers, and if he looked close enough, old arrowheads.

  He knew those things, so why—

  The wind changed, energized. Not only that, but also color returned to the hills so they appeared the way they did in spring, green and living with wildflowers laying down yellow, red, and blue streaks.

  Yes, the wind. Not energy today so much as anger. Like in winter when storms howled and tore, forcing cattle to turn their backs to the sharp gusts. It wasn’t winter; he knew that. He felt as if he were getting drunk. Gust after gust tore at his flesh and blinded him. Just the same, he knew this wasn’t happening, which was the hell and fear of it.

  “Matt? What is it?”

  A different sound in the boiling wind. Not new so much as what he’d heard earlier and had denied.

  Howling. A solitary predator voice, then another, weaving together like tall prairie grasses. Pushing past his skin, sliding over and then into his muscles. Creating fissures in his bones. Gnawing at his veins to make him bleed.

  Taking him.

  “Matt. You’re hurting me.”

  Despite Cat’s warning, Matt continued to grip her arms hard enough to leave bruises. Self-preservation told her to fight him, knee him where it’d get his attention, but their encounters had always been rough. Maybe he was simply kicking things up a notch.

  “What about your ranch hands? Any chance they’ll show up?”

  “Huh?”

  Noting that he was still staring off into the distance, she leaned into him until her breasts brushed his middle. Sliding a leg between his, she rubbed the inside of his right thigh.

  A shudder washed through him in fits and starts.

  “Look at me, damn it,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what was on our agenda?”

  His lips parted, prompting her to prepare for another “huh,” but he closed them without saying anything. Slowly, as if he didn’t want to, he turned his head toward her. No way could she make herself believe the glow in his eyes was caused by the sun.

  Right now, Matt wasn’t the man she’d thought he was. Hell, at the moment, she wasn’t 100 percent sure he was a man.

  “Let me go,” she commanded. “This isn’t funny.”

  Another shudder struck him. “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know? Lighten up on your grip or I’ll make you.”

  Instead of pointing out that her strength didn’t hold a proverbial candle to his, his fingers relaxed. Pain relaxed into pressure, which she could handle.

  “That’s good.” Needing to better balance her weight, she removed her leg from between his. “Don’t forget, I’m not some green-broke filly.”

  “Hmm.”

  Damn it, the Matt who’d shoved her sex life into overdrive that first night remained buried beneath the surface of whoever he’d become. If she didn’t know better, she’d conclude he was zoned out on something.

  When she tried to pull her arms free, his hold briefly let up, only to increase again. Alarmed, she twisted to the side. “This isn’t funny, damn it.”

  “I didn’t intend it to be.”

  One second she was staring up at him; the next he’d let her go, clamped his hands around the sides of her waist, and hoisted her up and onto his shoulders so she was upside down. Her breath whooshed out.

  “What the hell—”

  “Shut up.”

  He’d never said anything like that to her. Always before he’d been polite and well mannered—right up until civilization no longer mattered to either of them. Arms dangling and hands nearly touching his buttocks, she tried to lift her head, only to stop because she feared sliding off. Wrapping an arm behind her back, he started walking. She thought about asking where they were going, but chances were he wouldn’t answer.

  Maybe he couldn’t.

  Dismissing the crazy thought, she relaxed. Or rather that had been her plan until he slid a hand between her legs, high where it counted. Desire oozed through her, prompting her to massage his ass cheeks.

  Head down, blood pooling behind her skull. Getting light-headed but not caring.

  He took one long stride after another, deep yet rapid breaths escaping a masculine chest.

  When he stopped moving, so did his hands.
More nervous than excited now, she waited. Instead of letting her down, however, he continued to rub her pussy. Little by little she relaxed, or rather he took her to that place. Despite the growing heat, she remained attuned to him, trying to guess what he was thinking—if he was.

  Finally, even with the grand melting sensation throughout her cunt, she could no longer ignore the pressure in her head.

  “Let me up.” Please. “I’m getting a headache.”

  “Hmm.”

  No, this wasn’t the Matt he’d been. That man would have expressed concern and apologized. Using her hips as his anchor, he pulled her off him. Dizzy, she had no choice but to hold on to him. Instead of waiting for her balance to recover, he reached behind her and yanked on her bra.

  “Easy,” she warned. “There’s a knack to that.”

  Another hard yank, and the support was gone, causing her breasts to sag. He dropped the maybe-ruined bra to the ground.

  “What the hell . . . Damn it, Matt, if you’ve—”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Although she didn’t want to, she had no choice but to study his expression. He was in there and yet he wasn’t, the physical presence the same and sending undeniable messages to her body. However, she couldn’t say the same about the look in his eyes.

  “I’m willing to do this,” she said, determined to exert some control over the situation. “I wouldn’t have come out here if I hadn’t hoped sex would be part of it, but to say I’m crazy about how things have been going up until now would be a lie. If you’re playing macho man because you think it’s a turn-on, you’re entitled to another think.”

  Unless she’d missed something, he was listening to her, or at least trying to. His arms were by his side, for now.

  “About the silent-type role you’re playing today, it’s not working. I need more than grunts from you.”

  “Like what?” His voice sounded rusty.

  “Foreplay would be nice. No need to pile it on—just enough to turn me on.”

  By way of answer, he held his right hand up to her face. “No need to. Your jeans’ crotch is wet.”

  Point taken. “What I felt was more friction than a massage. Promise you’ll do better once the jeans are out of the way.”